Cedar has been prized timber since the days of Gilgamesh
No conifer has a longer record of human use than the true cedar. For over 4,000 years its fragrant, rot-resistant wood built temples and palaces. Genetic studies now confirm that two isolated cedar groves in northern Anatolia were planted deliberately more than 3,200 years ago, just as Hittite tablets suggested.
Cedrus is a small genus in the pine family, counted as anywhere from one to four species depending on the botanist. The trees grow wild at high altitude in two separate regions: the western Himalayas, between 1,500 and 3,200 m, and the Mediterranean mountains, between 1,000 and 2,200 m. Mediterranean cedars get their moisture as winter snow and endure dry summers, while Himalayan ones depend on the summer monsoon. In Lebanon only a small number of the famous cedars survive, in protected places; one grove, the Cedars of God by the Qadisha Valley, carries World Heritage status.
Mature trees usually reach 30 to 40 metres, rarely 65, with bark that turns from smooth pale grey to dark, ridged and scaly. Needles sit in dense tufts of 15 to 45 on short side shoots, and a waxy coating that guards against drying tints some trees a pale blue-green. Barrel-shaped seed cones take a year to ripen, then fall apart on the branch to free winged seeds. Those seeds carry blisters of foul-tasting resin, thought to deter squirrels.
Cedars look like firs and were long assumed to be their close kin, but genetic evidence shows they are sister to every other lineage in their subfamily. The oldest fossil, Cedrus penzhinaensis, comes from Early Cretaceous wood in Kamchatka. In the wild the species cannot interbreed because they live far apart, yet in gardens they cross freely; an Italian nursery has bred Atlas and deodar hybrids since the 1980s, named the Tesi Group in 2021.
The English name runs back through Latin to Greek kédros, which may first have meant juniper before being applied to these aromatic trees; citrus comes from the same root. Cedars are popular ornamentals where winters stay above about minus 25 degrees Celsius, make good bonsai, and yield wood and oil that naturally repel moths. Drought leaves them open to bark beetles.
Source: Cedrus
